Notes

Making the rounds yesterday and today, yet another “why I quit academia” piece. Quitpieces, I guess we’re calling them—or I am anyway. (The term “quit lit” has also circulated, but the “lit” designator seems generous to me.) There are lots more of these, if the genre is new to you.

Guess what. Working for a living is a pain in the ass. Nobody cares that I quit finance. Or advertising, retail, technology consulting, the entertainment industry, or anywhere else I’ve worked. The trick with quitting is that you want people to throw a party for you when you do it. Quitpieces are the opposite of parties. If you're writing a quitpiece you've already lost. Everybody knows that quitters quit.

You know what else is a pain in the ass?

The boredom and guilt of living off the interest from accumulated wealth. Also: living in abject poverty, or under the thumb of systemic injustice. So is shopping for groceries. Waiting for the wi-fi to work again. Studying at a university with wi-fi in every classroom. Driving to Disney World with kids in the car, or without them. Blogging, and not blogging. Forgetting your validation stamp. Forgetting your validation stamp and it’s raining. And there are already four cars behind you. And your kid is sick. Or your cat. Really sick, I mean.

There are reasons why scholars find succor in quitpieces, but they are both exhausting and counter-productive. Here’s the truth: academia is an amazing sector with some of the best features of any job, even if it also has substantial problems. Folks on the way out might feel like they're biting their thumb at something, and those still “stuck” on the inside of this troubled-but-terrific career might feel some welcome-if-temporary solidarity. But after that, it’s just more fodder for legislators, corporations, and the general public to undermine the academy. It helps nobody in the long run.

Why should anyone be impressed that somebody can quit something? Much more impressive is figuring out how to live with it. More staypieces, please.

Peering into the secrets of Louisa May Alcott’s real life sheds light on her treasured coming-of-age tale.

Early in the recent BBC/PBS miniseries Little Women, the first significant adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s novel in 24 years, Laurie (played by Jonah Hauer-King) tells Jo (Maya Hawke)—the first March sister he falls in love with—how much he enjoys watching her family from his nearby window. “It always looks so idyllic, when I look down and see you through the parlor window in the evenings,” he says. “It’s like the window is a frame and you’re all part of a perfect picture.”

“You must cherish your illusions if they make you happy,” Jo replies.

The scene nods to an awkward truth: Little Women is the window tableau and we, its readers, are Laurie, peering in and savoring its sham perfection, or at any rate its virtuous uplift. During the 150 years since the novel’s publication, fans have worshipped Alcott’s story of the four March sisters and their indomitable mother, Marmee, who navigate genteel poverty with valiant acceptance and who strive—always—to be better. Detractors (notably fewer in number) have generally fastened on some version of that saga of gritty goodness too, irritated rather than awed.

The paradox of all the myriad Trump tapes, whether real or decidedly not so, is that no president since Richard Nixon has seemed so obsessed with surreptitiously recording others, just as no president since Nixon has been so consistently incriminated by recordings of his own activity. Trump’s fixation with secretly documenting his dealings is a relic of a bygone era, one where Mafia dons were routinely convicted on the basis of secret recordings and Page Six divorces hinged on information gleaned from secret bugs. While the rest of the world has moved on to email, Trump resists it, citing its lack of security. So a question emerges: How does someone so paranoid about personal communications keep getting stung by secret tapes?

A Princeton geologist has endured decades of ridicule for arguing that the fifth extinction was caused not by an asteroid but by a series of colossal volcanic eruptions. But she’s reopened that debate.

Gerta Keller was waiting for me at the Mumbai airport so we could catch a flight to Hyderabad and go hunt rocks. “You won’t die,” she told me cheerfully as soon as I’d said hello. “I’ll bring you back.”

Death was not something I’d considered as a possible consequence of traveling with Keller, a 73-year-old paleontology and geology professor at Princeton University. She looked harmless enough: thin, with a blunt bob, wearing gray nylon pants and hiking boots, and carrying an insulated ShopRite supermarket bag by way of a purse.

I quickly learned that Keller felt such reassurances were necessary because, appropriately for someone who studies mass extinctions, she has a tendency to attract disaster.

At the president’s rallies, his devotees find the relief of belonging—and something more, besides.

Two weeks before the Iowa caucuses, in late January 2016, the Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump announced to an audience in Sioux City: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, okay? It’s, like, incredible.”

Trump, who has always been prone to fantastical overstatement, was derided at the time, but here and now—more than two and a half years later—the statement seems prescient.

I have never lost a public debate more completely than I have lost the debate over judicial confirmations. For many years, across administrations of both parties, I clung to the increasingly minority view that each judicial nominee ought not be a skirmish in a larger war for the courts, that the Senate should tend to defer to the president in its exercise of the power to “advise and consent” on nominees, and that the Senate should treat nominees decently and without undue delays. I started arguing this position during the Clinton administration; I maintained it during the Bush administration; I wrote a book on the subject warning of the dangers of the erosion of norms surrounding confirmations.

BERLIN—What happens when you do a primetime interview with a far-right leader—but don’t ask them anything about refugees?

German television viewers found out Sunday night when the broadcaster ZDF ran a major interview with Alexander Gauland, co-leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which capitalized on anti-refugee sentiment to earn its first-ever seats in the German parliament last fall. Ahead of the interview, ZDF’s Twitter feed teased the interviewas dealing with “climate change, retirement, digitalization—and without refugees.”

The resulting 19-minute interview, in which Gauland struggles to answer basic questions about his party’s positions on such issues, has been lauded by opponents of the AfD as masterful. Supporters of the AfD and Gauland himself panned it as biased. ZDF journalist Thomas Walde, who conducted the interview, repeatedly pushed Gauland to clarify or explain statements made by his fellow party members—and asked more than once about proposed policy “alternatives” from a party that counts the word “alternative” as part of its name.

A recent memoir from a former White House aide, Omarosa Manigault-Newman, has reignited interest in the possibility of a recording in which the president employs a racial slur for black people.

Updated at 4:25 p.m.

In 1993, The New York Timespublished an article headlined “Rap’s Embrace of ‘Nigger’ Fires Bitter Debate.” It’s not a word likely to find its way into headlines today.

Sometime in the past 25 years, using that word became the only proof of racism that much of the country is willing to accept. The dividing line is hard to find, but one pivotal moment came during the O. J. Simpson trial, as Simpson’s defense team fought to get a tape of Los Angeles Police Detective Mark Fuhrman using the word admitted as evidence. Fuhrman had previously denied using the word in the past decade; the defense tracked down a recording of Fuhrman using it in conversation with a scriptwriter who was working on a film about the LAPD.

The president’s spokeswoman has risked her credibility for him time and again, but on Tuesday she wouldn’t give a direct answer about whether he was recorded using a racist slur.

The request didn’t seem all that difficult: Could President Donald Trump’s spokeswoman say that he didn’t use the N word on tape?

Yet time after time during Tuesday’s briefing, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders parried the question, refusing to give a simple “yes” or “no.” Rather than answer the question herself, she repeatedly directed reporters to the president’s tweet from Monday, in which he said that the Apprentice producer Mark Burnett “called to say that there are NO TAPES of the Apprentice where I used such a terrible and disgusting word as attributed by Wacky and Deranged Omarosa. I don’t have that word in my vocabulary, and never have.” Here’s the exchange:

Reporter: Sarah, have you asked the president if he ever used the N word?

Sanders: The president addressed that question directly via Twitter. I’d refer you back to him. And I can certainly say I’ve never heard him use that term or anything similar.

Reporter: You asked him directly?

Sanders: I didn’t have to, because he addressed it to the American people all at one time.

Reporter: Why haven’t you asked him directly?

Sanders: The president answered that question directly on Twitter today.

Reporter: Can you stand at the podium and guarantee the American people that they’ll never hear Donald Trump utter the N word in any context?

Sanders: I can’t guarantee anything, but I can tell you that the president addressed this question directly. I can tell you that I’ve never heard it.

Buoyed by President Trump’s support for the industry, a veteran miner is putting his cash on the line and reopening his business.

BESSEMER, Ala.—It was hulking, it was orange, and its name was Trump.

Randy Johnson looked on as his new 220-ton excavator carved up the ground, clearing the field of rocks to help unearth the coal underneath. Four weeks earlier, the central Alabama mine’s 22 employees had gathered to christen the $2.7 million purchase, painting “TRUMP” in white block letters along the excavator’s side. The day I visited, a recent Friday in July, those letters gleamed under the punishing southern sun, the machine’s every move—every swivel at the base, every curl of the claw—an implicit tribute to the 45th president.

It’s tradition in the mining industry to name the “big machines.” Apart from the land itself, they represent the bulk of capital for a new site. For Johnson, though, this excavator was emblematic of much more. The 71-year-old Alabama native and mining veteran had bowed out of the industry in 2014, when he says the Obama administration’s “war on coal” pummeled the market. But with Donald Trump’s election came a wave of “optimism,” he told me: optimism that the crush of regulations would ebb, that the “dirty” caricatures of the industry, aggravated by Barack Obama, would start to soften. So at the turn of the year, when he learned of an idle reserve in Bessemer, Johnson reopened his company, called one of his old foremen, and made the largest investment of his career.

People know a famous community of killer whales as individuals, with their own names, families, and personalities—which has made their woes even harder to take.

The first half of the killer whale’s scientific name—Orcinus orca—comes from the Latin for “of the realms of the dead.” For one population of orcas living in the waters of the Pacific Northwest, that etymology has taken on a newly dark resonance.

Last month, a 20-year-old female orca named Tahlequah (J35) gave birth to a male calf that died after half an hour. While many orca mothers have been seen carrying the bodies of their dead calves for a day or so, Tahlequah did so for 17 days—a heartbreaking tour that captured the world’s attention, and that ended last Friday. “I have never seen that kind of grief,” says Ken Balcomb from the Center for Whale Research.

Meanwhile, scientists noticed that a 3-year-old female named Scarlet (J50) was looking severely emaciated, with her ribs showing through her side. They have since given her a shot of antibiotics, via dart, and are considering feeding her more medications embedded within live salmon.

Peering into the secrets of Louisa May Alcott’s real life sheds light on her treasured coming-of-age tale.

Early in the recent BBC/PBS miniseries Little Women, the first significant adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s novel in 24 years, Laurie (played by Jonah Hauer-King) tells Jo (Maya Hawke)—the first March sister he falls in love with—how much he enjoys watching her family from his nearby window. “It always looks so idyllic, when I look down and see you through the parlor window in the evenings,” he says. “It’s like the window is a frame and you’re all part of a perfect picture.”

“You must cherish your illusions if they make you happy,” Jo replies.

The scene nods to an awkward truth: Little Women is the window tableau and we, its readers, are Laurie, peering in and savoring its sham perfection, or at any rate its virtuous uplift. During the 150 years since the novel’s publication, fans have worshipped Alcott’s story of the four March sisters and their indomitable mother, Marmee, who navigate genteel poverty with valiant acceptance and who strive—always—to be better. Detractors (notably fewer in number) have generally fastened on some version of that saga of gritty goodness too, irritated rather than awed.

The paradox of all the myriad Trump tapes, whether real or decidedly not so, is that no president since Richard Nixon has seemed so obsessed with surreptitiously recording others, just as no president since Nixon has been so consistently incriminated by recordings of his own activity. Trump’s fixation with secretly documenting his dealings is a relic of a bygone era, one where Mafia dons were routinely convicted on the basis of secret recordings and Page Six divorces hinged on information gleaned from secret bugs. While the rest of the world has moved on to email, Trump resists it, citing its lack of security. So a question emerges: How does someone so paranoid about personal communications keep getting stung by secret tapes?

A Princeton geologist has endured decades of ridicule for arguing that the fifth extinction was caused not by an asteroid but by a series of colossal volcanic eruptions. But she’s reopened that debate.

Gerta Keller was waiting for me at the Mumbai airport so we could catch a flight to Hyderabad and go hunt rocks. “You won’t die,” she told me cheerfully as soon as I’d said hello. “I’ll bring you back.”

Death was not something I’d considered as a possible consequence of traveling with Keller, a 73-year-old paleontology and geology professor at Princeton University. She looked harmless enough: thin, with a blunt bob, wearing gray nylon pants and hiking boots, and carrying an insulated ShopRite supermarket bag by way of a purse.

I quickly learned that Keller felt such reassurances were necessary because, appropriately for someone who studies mass extinctions, she has a tendency to attract disaster.

At the president’s rallies, his devotees find the relief of belonging—and something more, besides.

Two weeks before the Iowa caucuses, in late January 2016, the Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump announced to an audience in Sioux City: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, okay? It’s, like, incredible.”

Trump, who has always been prone to fantastical overstatement, was derided at the time, but here and now—more than two and a half years later—the statement seems prescient.

I have never lost a public debate more completely than I have lost the debate over judicial confirmations. For many years, across administrations of both parties, I clung to the increasingly minority view that each judicial nominee ought not be a skirmish in a larger war for the courts, that the Senate should tend to defer to the president in its exercise of the power to “advise and consent” on nominees, and that the Senate should treat nominees decently and without undue delays. I started arguing this position during the Clinton administration; I maintained it during the Bush administration; I wrote a book on the subject warning of the dangers of the erosion of norms surrounding confirmations.

BERLIN—What happens when you do a primetime interview with a far-right leader—but don’t ask them anything about refugees?

German television viewers found out Sunday night when the broadcaster ZDF ran a major interview with Alexander Gauland, co-leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which capitalized on anti-refugee sentiment to earn its first-ever seats in the German parliament last fall. Ahead of the interview, ZDF’s Twitter feed teased the interviewas dealing with “climate change, retirement, digitalization—and without refugees.”

The resulting 19-minute interview, in which Gauland struggles to answer basic questions about his party’s positions on such issues, has been lauded by opponents of the AfD as masterful. Supporters of the AfD and Gauland himself panned it as biased. ZDF journalist Thomas Walde, who conducted the interview, repeatedly pushed Gauland to clarify or explain statements made by his fellow party members—and asked more than once about proposed policy “alternatives” from a party that counts the word “alternative” as part of its name.

A recent memoir from a former White House aide, Omarosa Manigault-Newman, has reignited interest in the possibility of a recording in which the president employs a racial slur for black people.

Updated at 4:25 p.m.

In 1993, The New York Timespublished an article headlined “Rap’s Embrace of ‘Nigger’ Fires Bitter Debate.” It’s not a word likely to find its way into headlines today.

Sometime in the past 25 years, using that word became the only proof of racism that much of the country is willing to accept. The dividing line is hard to find, but one pivotal moment came during the O. J. Simpson trial, as Simpson’s defense team fought to get a tape of Los Angeles Police Detective Mark Fuhrman using the word admitted as evidence. Fuhrman had previously denied using the word in the past decade; the defense tracked down a recording of Fuhrman using it in conversation with a scriptwriter who was working on a film about the LAPD.

The president’s spokeswoman has risked her credibility for him time and again, but on Tuesday she wouldn’t give a direct answer about whether he was recorded using a racist slur.

The request didn’t seem all that difficult: Could President Donald Trump’s spokeswoman say that he didn’t use the N word on tape?

Yet time after time during Tuesday’s briefing, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders parried the question, refusing to give a simple “yes” or “no.” Rather than answer the question herself, she repeatedly directed reporters to the president’s tweet from Monday, in which he said that the Apprentice producer Mark Burnett “called to say that there are NO TAPES of the Apprentice where I used such a terrible and disgusting word as attributed by Wacky and Deranged Omarosa. I don’t have that word in my vocabulary, and never have.” Here’s the exchange:

Reporter: Sarah, have you asked the president if he ever used the N word?

Sanders: The president addressed that question directly via Twitter. I’d refer you back to him. And I can certainly say I’ve never heard him use that term or anything similar.

Reporter: You asked him directly?

Sanders: I didn’t have to, because he addressed it to the American people all at one time.

Reporter: Why haven’t you asked him directly?

Sanders: The president answered that question directly on Twitter today.

Reporter: Can you stand at the podium and guarantee the American people that they’ll never hear Donald Trump utter the N word in any context?

Sanders: I can’t guarantee anything, but I can tell you that the president addressed this question directly. I can tell you that I’ve never heard it.

Buoyed by President Trump’s support for the industry, a veteran miner is putting his cash on the line and reopening his business.

BESSEMER, Ala.—It was hulking, it was orange, and its name was Trump.

Randy Johnson looked on as his new 220-ton excavator carved up the ground, clearing the field of rocks to help unearth the coal underneath. Four weeks earlier, the central Alabama mine’s 22 employees had gathered to christen the $2.7 million purchase, painting “TRUMP” in white block letters along the excavator’s side. The day I visited, a recent Friday in July, those letters gleamed under the punishing southern sun, the machine’s every move—every swivel at the base, every curl of the claw—an implicit tribute to the 45th president.

It’s tradition in the mining industry to name the “big machines.” Apart from the land itself, they represent the bulk of capital for a new site. For Johnson, though, this excavator was emblematic of much more. The 71-year-old Alabama native and mining veteran had bowed out of the industry in 2014, when he says the Obama administration’s “war on coal” pummeled the market. But with Donald Trump’s election came a wave of “optimism,” he told me: optimism that the crush of regulations would ebb, that the “dirty” caricatures of the industry, aggravated by Barack Obama, would start to soften. So at the turn of the year, when he learned of an idle reserve in Bessemer, Johnson reopened his company, called one of his old foremen, and made the largest investment of his career.

People know a famous community of killer whales as individuals, with their own names, families, and personalities—which has made their woes even harder to take.

The first half of the killer whale’s scientific name—Orcinus orca—comes from the Latin for “of the realms of the dead.” For one population of orcas living in the waters of the Pacific Northwest, that etymology has taken on a newly dark resonance.

Last month, a 20-year-old female orca named Tahlequah (J35) gave birth to a male calf that died after half an hour. While many orca mothers have been seen carrying the bodies of their dead calves for a day or so, Tahlequah did so for 17 days—a heartbreaking tour that captured the world’s attention, and that ended last Friday. “I have never seen that kind of grief,” says Ken Balcomb from the Center for Whale Research.

Meanwhile, scientists noticed that a 3-year-old female named Scarlet (J50) was looking severely emaciated, with her ribs showing through her side. They have since given her a shot of antibiotics, via dart, and are considering feeding her more medications embedded within live salmon.